An official White House news release has gained attention for the choice of language used in it.
In a government website article titled ‘Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments’, the White House claimed former President Joe Biden spent millions on ‘making mice transgender’.
‘The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual),’ the White House wrote.
The press release came just hours after President Trump’s speech to Congress, in which he focused on what he called ‘wasteful’ spending of American tax dollars.
But the language used in the White House’s official release about this ‘waste’ has raised a few eyebrows. ‘Does a middle schooler run the White House website?’ one X user wrote.
Another added: ‘Never have I ever read such an atrociously unprofessional sentence. Not even feigning professionalism or unbiased at this point.’
Past US governments have had their own forms of language – with President Bush, ‘frank and folksy’ language was normal – but not in official documents and releases, historian and propaganda analyst Ian Garner told Metro.
‘That’s not the case with Trump anymore. The boundaries between institutions and politicians are ‘completely collapsing’, Mr Garner said.
‘It’s fairly well-established fact by academic research that when the state starts to talk in a particular kind of language, ordinary citizens start to talk in that language too,’ he added.
‘People at the “top” start to talk in this language too, often to the point where they can’t tell the difference between their “real language” and the language of the state.
‘We saw that in Soviet Russia, we saw that in Nazi Germany. You name the state, the more control the state has, the more the state can barrage people with this kind of language, the more it changes the way that citizens begin to frame their own perceptions as well.’
Citing the recent White House release, Mr Garner said ‘This sort of language sounds as if it could have come from one of Trump’s own social media posts – and it will become more and more normal.
‘We’re seeing it from the press officers, other politicians.
‘Reality is shaped by that language and I think we’re in for quite a wild ride in that we’re at a point where the American government – at least the institutions of the American government – can’t reliably be expected to publish material that is true and is based on reality.’
During his last term in office, President Trump became infamous for attacking the press, especially CNN.
In 2022, he threatened to sue CNN for calling his false 2020 election claims ‘lies’. Numerous lawsuits that were filed alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election were dismissed due to a lack of evidence, even by judges who were appointed by Trump.
60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl previously recalled how the President revealed his ‘strategy’ for attacking the press to him during an off-camera chat in 2016.
She recalled: ‘(He) started to attack the press … I said, … “You’ve won (the Republican nomination) … Why do you keep hammering at this?”
‘And he said: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all. So when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”‘
In 2023, a top European Union official said that X, formerly known as Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news and urged owner Elon Musk to comply with the bloc’s laws aimed at combating disinformation.
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